Chapter Text
“I request an audience with the hermit.”
Sakura nestled herself further down into the warm folds of her blanket. “Denied.”
There was a brief moment of nervous anticipation, then Ino yanked the blanket away just as Sakura knew she would. Sakura cringed at the cold and the smell of air that had not grown stale within her little blanket fort and stared reproachfully at Ino, who regarded her with a blend of concern, irritation, and exasperation.
“Are you seriously reading your textbook under a blanket with your phone flashlight? In a room with the lights on?”
Sakura huffed. “I’m recovering in seclusion.”
“You’ve been recovering in seclusion for half a week.”
Sakura wrinkled her nose. Had it really been that long? She took a tentative sniff at her armpit and cringed. Ino gave her a knowing look.
“I’ll leave you alone if you take a shower and eat something. Lurking beneath blankets has contained the smell, but it is starting to get a little ripe in here. I’ll vacuum up all your crumbs.”
Sakura grumbled and slouched self-consciously to the bathroom that she had once shared with Ino. After Sakura moved, Ino’s skincare and makeup bottles had completely overrun the space, and it made Sakura a little sad to see the way her absence in the apartment had been made tangible. She hadn't expected Ino to keep a shrine to her, but she still felt an odd hollowness when she opened old drawers and found new things in them. It made her feel like a ghost in this space that had once been home.
Her mind drifted back towards what she considered to be home now: late night snickering in a kitchen much cleaner than Ino’s, stacks of paperbacks littering the tables, skidding around corners in her socks with a panting dog nipping at her heels—
She firmly cut off that line of thought.
Shutting the bathroom door behind herself, she studied herself in the mirror. Deep purple bags stared back at her and she frowned; looking this way felt like an admission of defeat, and Sakura had always been a sore loser.
She wondered if he was just as upset, and if he also had big purple bags from staying up late and replaying the same moments in his mind. Remembering the party was a painful luxury in the darkness of early morning hours. She saw his face before her, eyes bright with pain.
I have so many feelings for you that I don’t know what to do with them all.
She saw her reflection scowl in the mirror and swat at another tear that had sprung loose. She was sick of this.
Snatching an armful of Ino’s fanciest products, Sakura turned the shower temperature as hot as it would go. She would leave this bathroom a new woman, or at least one that was ready to return to her life.
Kakashi stared at the ceiling and watched it grow darker as the day ended. He spent a great deal of time like this now: watching gradations of the day rise and fall on the blank expanse of ceiling above him. Pakkun nudged the hand Kakashi had left dangling off the side of the couch with his small wet nose.
He pulled himself up slowly and went to retrieve Pakkun’s dish, feeling unimaginably old and weary as he watched little pieces of kibble flood the bowl.
He couldn’t become used to the silence in the apartment because he hadn’t realized just how much noise Sakura had made. From the front door she always kicked open so hard that it left dents in the wall to the furtive rustling of her midnight snacking, she had filled the space with low reverberations of daily life. The new silence was echoing—deafening.
He laid back down on the couch and tried to empty his mind again. Whenever he had thoughts that weren’t about the ceiling or taking care of Pakkun, he would find himself wracked with guilt. Over and over again, he saw the hope in her face crumple into understanding. It was almost as though she had expected or known that in the end, he would be a disappointment.
He didn’t know how to tell her that the feeling in his chest when she had pressed her lips against his was paralyzing. Wonderful, but terrifying.
He glanced at his phone, dead on the table. Obito and Rin had called and texted him so many times in the last three days that he had eventually put his phone on silent and left it to collect messages. He wondered, occasionally, if he should turn it on in case Sakura tried to reach him.
But then there was the guilt again, the half-baked reminder of what it would be like to be with Sakura and then suddenly without Sakura. Was it better to sit in this odd silence alone, or was it better to live in fear that it would all somehow be snatched away from him now that he could no longer pretend that what they shared was just casual friendship?
Part of him wished he had never moved in with her and realized how wonderful their little life together was, but a more honest and traitorous part of himself knew that he wouldn’t trade the last few months for anything. He had been able to pretend as long as he could that their relationship wasn’t evolving into something bigger, and now he found himself unwillingly dumped at the crossroads.
There was a knock at the door and he jolted upright. He knew she was going to come back eventually, but he hadn’t planned how he would deal with it. But then again, why would she be knocking? Perhaps to give him fair warning or a chance to hide from her in his room.
He waited with warring feelings of excitement and panic to see if the door would open. To see if sound would return to the apartment. Several more moments passed and there was another knock at the door. Did she lose her keys, or was this some ploy to get him to talk to her? The idea made him feel equal parts hopeful and self-loathing.
He swallowed the feelings down and went to the door. The least he could do was let her into her own apartment. He held his breath as the door swung open to reveal—
Genma.
“Asshole,” Genma snapped as he shouldered his way in, clearly anticipating that the door would be slammed in his face once he had been identified. Kakashi stumbled backwards and then numbly followed Genma to the kitchen. He was carrying a bulky package under his arm wrapped in newspapers.
Genma let out a wordless sound of anger when he saw Kakashi’s phone sitting on the table. Snatching it up and brandishing it at Kakashi, he yelled, “Ever thought of using this? Rin and Obito are out of their minds with worry. If they didn’t have to go one some stupid wine tasting tour with his family, they would have taken a battering ram to your door. I’ve been waiting outside the building for like half an hour for someone to let me in!”
“Sorry.”
The apology only seemed to make Genma angrier. “Why would you think it was alright to just fall off the face of the earth? I only knew something was wrong because I got an earful from Ino after the party. Imagine my surprise when my friend wouldn’t even tell us what was going on.”
Kakashi shrugged. He did feel some flickers of guilt, but his main emotion was still a blank numbness. “I can see how that would be upsetting.”
Genma looked as though he were considering bonking Kakashi over the head with his package. “Upsetting?”
Somehow managing to feel even more tired than he was before, Kakashi sat back down on the couch. “Upsetting,” he repeated in dull agreement.
Genma was silent until his anger seemed to wane into guarded disapproval and concern. He pulled up one of the kitchen chairs and lowered himself onto it.
“All right, consider the interrogation started. What happened, and why have you put yourself under house arrest? And why is Sakura crashing at Ino’s?”
Kakashi ran a tired hand over his face. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’ve had seventy-two hours to not talk about it.”
Knowing Genma wouldn’t leave until he had wheedled some truth out of him, Kakashi shrugged. “After the party Sakura and I…”
“Confronted your obvious feelings for each other? The ones that have been apparent to everyone since Halloween?”
Kakashi scowled. “Something like that.”
“And what went wrong?”
Kakashi felt his hands flex over his knees. “I told her that I didn’t want a relationship.”
Genma stared at him, then gestured around the apartment. “So what do you call this, then?”
“We’re roommates.”
Genma braced his head in his hands. “You’ve always had a tendency towards self-sabotage, but this is concerning. Even for you.”
“It is fine to not want—”
“Yes, yes,” Genma snapped. “Of course it is fine to not want to date someone. For the right reasons! But what I don’t understand is why you don’t want to date the person you have been happily cohabiting with for three months. You know, the one you invited with you to a wedding shower?”
Kakashi cringed. Leading her on had been his fault. He had thought he could make this work—had been trying to make this work—but he knew from the moment she pressed herself against him that there was simply too much to lose. She must think that he had been playing an elaborate and cruel joke.
“Quit being melodramatic and tell me why you did this.”
Kakashi startled out of his thoughts. He had almost forgotten Genma was there. He had very little desire to tell Genma about his reasons for not wanting to be in a relationship with Sakura. He had a hard enough time trying to explain them to Sakura, and she certainly deserved to hear them more than Genma did.
“I’m just not a relationship person.”
“I don’t believe that. You’re like a very selective and dramatic dog. You have a handful of people that you are very loyal and attached to, and I think Sakura is one of them. I also don’t think that it has been entirely platonic.”
Kakashi resisted the childish urge to throw a couch pillow at Genma. “Thanks for the unsolicited assessment of my character and my friendships. Is it time for you to go yet?”
Genma let out a low whistle. “Kakashi gets petty when bothered—that’s new. Must be a raw nerve in there somewhere.”
Kakashi decided that continuing to speak would just give Genma more ammunition. He chose to sit in petulant silence, not unlike the way he had when he was a kid. Genma narrowed his eyes.
“Fine. You don’t want to talk to me, you can talk to Ino.”
Kakashi felt the blood drain from his face. “She’s here?”
“Do you think you’d still be alive if she were? No, she made me promise to call her once I was finally admitted to your apartment.” Kakashi watched warily as Genma pointedly dialed a number on his phone. “If anyone can fish the truth out of you, she can.”
They waited in silence until Genma plastered a somewhat nervous smile on his face, even though Ino wasn’t there to see it.
“Hey, I just—”
Kakashi heard the crackle of loud and indistinguishable yelling come from the phone. Genma winced and held it a few inches away from his ear. “Uh huh,” he said. “Yes, I agree.”
Kakashi rolled his eyes and Genma shot him a dark look full of blame as the unintelligible yelling continued. Finally, Genma sighed and addressed Kakashi.
“Sakura has already forbidden Ino from interacting with you, both nonverbally and verbally.”
Kakashi felt a sharp pang at the mention of Sakura. The fact that she had tried to spare him from Ino’s intervention sent guilt and miserable affection rushing through him. He wondered what Ino considered appropriate nonverbal retribution. He probably deserved it.
“Ino does, however, have some general questions that she would like answered.”
Kakashi shifted nervously. “Like what?”
Genma listened for a moment and then coughed. “Are you sure—all right, all right.” He looked back at Kakashi and cleared his throat. “Ino would like to know, who do you think you are?”
Kakashi frowned. “I don’t under—”
“Are you aware that she knows where you live?”
“I—”
“Have you ever had a single rational thought?”
“I really don’t—”
“Do you possess even two brain cells to rub together?”
“I mean—”
“Do you regret what you did?”
“Yes.”
Genma stopped short and gave Kakashi a sharp look. Kakashi immediately regretted having said anything at all. He felt like he had been tricked, and from what Sakura had told him about Ino, he probably had been.
“He said yes to that one.”
The loud crackle of staticky phone yelling came to an abrupt halt. There were several tense beats of silence before slightly subdued sound came from the phone again.
“Are you doing this to punish yourself? Do you realize that by doing this, you’re also punishing Sakura?”
Kakashi felt his stomach plummet. Guilt so strong that it nearly made him lightheaded surged through his body. “I didn’t mean to.”
Genma relayed this to Ino. He listened for a moment and then darted an uneasy glance at Kakashi. Kakashi felt very little sympathy for him: if Genma hadn’t wanted to play therapist, he shouldn’t have barged into his apartment and called his future clinician girlfriend.
“Do you think that it is possible to live a life without vulnerability?” Genma asked. “Is a life without risks a happy one?”
Pressing his fingers to his pulsing temples, Kakashi said, “What if that is the only way I know how to live?” He surprised even himself with his honesty. Maybe it was something he had wanted to admit for a while, and it was a relief to finally have it ferreted out of him. All of this was beginning to feel like a long and elaborate nightmare.
Genma listened to Ino's repsonse, and then her rapid voice cut off suddenly. Genma gazed down at the phone as if to check that he had indeed been hung up on. “I guess she was done!” he said in a falsely positive tone.
“What did she say?”
“Well, I don’t really think it matters—”
“What did she say?”
Genma sighed. “She told me to tell you to grow up. But now I feel a little bad about all of this.”
Kakashi stared at the wall behind Genma’s head. “I see.”
“Don’t tell Sakura that Ino used me as mediator. I think this would still count as interacting, even though it technically wasn’t verbal or nonverbal.”
Kakashi nodded numbly. He felt like he had been raked over coals. He did not want to be the subject of Ino’s wrath again.
“I didn’t realize she was going to be so… abrupt with you.”
Kakashi felt the ghost of a smile that Genma wouldn’t be able to see underneath his bandana. “You didn’t?”
Genma shrugged sheepishly. “I suppose I could have guessed.”
“What’s in that package?”
Genma’s eyes traveled back to the bulky thing wrapped in newspapers that he had set on top of his knees. He cringed and Kakashi wondered how he was going to put up with even more bad news because it was all beginning to make him feel hollowed out.
“It was a joke—one that would have gone over better about a week ago. But now it’s here and we kind of have to use it because the guy who got it for me was really annoyed about how specific it was.”
“Genma, what is it?”
Genma began to gingerly peel back the layers of crumpled newspaper. He discarded them on the ground in a sad heap, which Pakkun promptly began to sniff. Kakashi saw a bright, almost offensive pastel pink, and then he realized he was looking at a microwave door.
“Surprise,” Genma said weakly.
Kakashi just gazed at the pink metal. He could hear Sakura laughing at it so hard that she was snorting, sinking to the ground in his mind’s eye as she tried to get ahold of herself. He saw her shooting him teasing and victorious looks from the corners of her eyes when she used it to make her 3am second dinners.
“I’m sure Sakura will appreciate it when she comes back,” Genma said.
Kakashi nodded. She absolutely would, in the unlikely event that she ever came back.
“It’ll only take me about twenty minutes to install it.”
“Thank you.”
Genma’s brow knit. “Have you been eating well?”
“Yes,” Kakashi lied.
Genma picked up the edge of a cardboard box sitting on the kitchen table. “Donuts? I thought you didn’t like sweets.”
Kakashi didn’t, but he had ordered the donuts in an unbearable fit of nostalgia at 6am when he had found himself unable to sleep. He wasn’t sure what he had been trying to accomplish in recreating the scene of their donut breakfast. It had certainly made him miserable, which he now supposed might have been the point. He hadn’t been able to eat more than just a bite of one, the sticky sweetness cloying in his mouth. He wondered how he had enjoyed them so much before and then grew fed up with himself for asking questions with obvious answers.
Genma seemed to take Kakashi’s silence as a final and pointed admission of defeat, which it certainly was. He got up and went to start installing the microwave door.
“I might be able to buff this paint off if it upsets your landlord. If you mess something else up badly enough that you won’t get your security deposit back, I won’t bother. Feel free to break some stuff to save me the effort.”
Kakashi made a noncommittal sound.
“I’ll be out of town the next few days for a job, but I'll be fully invested in Kakashi rehabilitation when I get back if you still haven’t left this apartment.”
Kakashi did not like the sound of Kakashi rehabilitation or what it would entail, but he was too tired to snark back. Lowering himself to the floor, he pet Pakkun and watched Genma install the obnoxious, glowing reminder of Sakura right in the middle of their apartment.
He wondered it was a good or bad sign that he was happy it would be there.
Sakura heard a knock at the front door and froze in the middle of toweling her hair, submerged in a fragrant and steamy cloud that smelled distinctly of Ino. She tried to draw some courage from that as she poked her head out of the bathroom to hear what happened when Ino went to the door. If she smelled like Ino, she could certainly be as vicious as Ino.
Ino opened the front door with a clipped, “Yes?”
Sakura heard an unintelligible male voice and slowly set down the towel. She crept around the corner to peer over Ino’s shoulder and found—
“Hello,” Sasuke said.
Sakura gaped. “What are you doing here?”
Sasuke seemed affronted. “What are you doing here?”
Ino hissed out an unimpressed sigh. “Idiots,” she grumbled as she pushed past Sakura to return to the kitchen. “I am surrounded by emotionally unintelligent idiots.”
Sakura, who felt there was very little ground to be gained in trying to prove Ino wrong, scowled at Sasuke and said, “I asked first!”
Sasuke raised an elegant eyebrow. Once she had caught him tweezing them during college and she had never let him live it down. “I’m here as a friend,” he said. Sakura planted a hand on her hip in blatant skepticism. He looked impossibly grumpier. “I was told,” he continued, “that you needed a friend.”
She felt herself soften. “Who told you that?”
“My relatives have been gossiping about you for days now.”
Sakura wilted. “I suppose we made a scene at their nice event.”
“You really did.”
Sakura felt embarrassed and annoyed in equal parts. “Well, have you come here to get some intel to spread among the aunties?”
Sasuke leveled her with an unimpressed look and her anger fizzled away when he didn’t react with the usual retaliatory cynicism that drove her insane.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked.
“A walk?”
Sasuke held up a hand and used two fingers to demonstrate the motion of walking. Suddenly Sakura wanted to argue again. Instead, she pulled two of Ino’s hoodies off the hook on the door and yanked them over her shirt. If she was going into the outside world, she would not be doing so cold.
“Ino, we’ll be back in a bit!”
Ino’s blonde head swung around the corner, which made Sakura realize Ino had only pretended to go to the kitchen and had been listening the whole time.
“Return her to me in this condition,” Ino barked at Sasuke. “I just got her to shower and I refuse to sit through more stinky self-pity days.”
Sakura flushed. “Thanks for the concern,” she grumbled, pushing Sasuke into the hallway ahead of her. She knew that at the end of all this she would owe Ino something big; something frothy and beautiful and obnoxiously expensive and luxurious. Her gratitude didn’t make her want to throttle Ino any less.
They went down the stairs in silence and picked a direction to start walking in. She began to feel annoyed at Sasuke’s silence.
“Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?”
He scowled. “I’m waiting for you to say something. You’re the one who left a wedding shower after flipping off my grandmother. At which point in that narrative do you want to start?”
“Ino did that!”
Sasuke gave her a look that clearly communicated he considered her complicit.
“You always do this,” Sakura snapped, a familiar frustration rising in her. “You always try to make me feel small after I’ve had a hard time at one of your family’s fancy parties! I’m sick of it!”
“I didn’t even invite you this time! You went with someone else! How am I to blame for that?”
“Look, just because I don’t have a— a,” she fumbled wordlessly for a moment “— a pedigree doesn’t mean I deserve to be treated like I’m stupid. And honestly, your grandmother deserved it!”
“We don’t have pedigrees, we’re not dogs.”
“If you were, you’d be poodles.”
Sasuke gaped, then shut his mouth and glared. “Some of us,” he said in a tight voice, “might be poodle-esque. But certainly not me.”
Sakura managed a smile: she knew an olive branch when she saw one. “Not even a little bit?”
“Not even a little bit,” he grumbled, already back to waspish and prickly.
Sakura nudged him with her arm. He relented and darted a suspicious glance at her. “I really don’t know what to ask,” he admitted. “It’s been a while.”
She thought back to the cagey conversation they’d had at the Halloween party and the way she hadn’t been able to stop glancing at Kakashi across the room. His shoulders had been tense and his face had been carefully blank while he looked anywhere but at her and Sasuke. It had made her heart feel like it was twisting itself into pieces to see him avoiding her, especially when he came back from his run flushed and triumphant with Gai. She’d felt like she had ruined something that night. She could barely remember what she and Sasuke had talked about.
“I assume you and your new roommate started… dating?”
Sakura snorted. “Not really.” Sasuke raised an eyebrow and she amended, “Well, kind of unofficially. In a very cowardly no labels kind of way.”
“Is he good enough for you?”
Sakura laughed at the gruff question that was so unlike Sasuke. It seemed like he was trying to show his esteem for her in an odd way, and it might have even been an admission that at his worst points, he hadn’t been ‘good’ enough for her. Whatever he thought that meant. Perhaps he was just parroting Naruto in an effort to be supportive. Naruto had clearly defined ideas of what was ‘good’ and ‘bad.’
“Yeah,” she said. “Infuriatingly good enough.” It was painful to recognize the truth of how she still felt, even as the ache of the last few days lingered in her chest.
How was one to explain Kakashi, a man who was chronically late and who wouldn’t let people look at him, but who made the best soups and removed the worst stains? A man who shoved people away at every opportunity, but who stayed up through the night to help with problems that weren’t his? Sasuke raised an eyebrow at her and she shrugged.
“He’s just… very competent. At many things.”
“All right,” he grumbled. “I’m not over this enough to talk about that.”
“I didn’t mean competent in that way! Just in general! Nothing like that has happened yet.”
“You’ve lived together for months and nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Maybe he’s bad,” Sasuke said blithely. “At—“
“Sasuke!”
He huffed. “Fine. What have you been doing all this time then?”
A surge of memories and sentimentality washed over her. “We’ve been annoying each other. A lot.”
Sasuke gave her one of his small smiles—the tiniest twitch of his lips. “We used to annoy each other.”
Sakura looped her arm through his and smiled back sadly. “I don’t think we annoyed each other in the right way.”
He avoided meeting her gaze, but he squeezed her arm. “No, I don’t think we did.”
“I think this means I’ll transition gracefully from annoying on and off girlfriend to annoying permanent friend.”
“Does it have to be annoying friend? Couldn’t it just be considerate friend?”
“Nope. Take it or leave it.”
He shot her a look out of the corner of his eyes, one of those searching and anxious little looks that had always twisted her heart.
“I’ll take it,” he said with resigned grumpiness, but also something a little like hope.
Kakashi yanked on his running shoes and met Pakkun’s familiar stare. “I’ll be back in a little bit. I have to get out of this apartment before I start rotting.”
Pakkun blinked skeptically. Kakashi rumpled his ears and locked the door. He jogged down the stairs and checked his phone. Having become a nocturnal creature meant that running at 7pm was the equivalent of early morning exercise for Kakashi. He cringed at the dim lighting waiting outside. He’d just have to be careful not to trip on anything in the autumn gloom descending on their neighborhood. He mourned the summer when their apartment had been flooded with light and Sakura had been around more often before her classes started.
He crushed that thought when his feet hit the pavement. He was running to distract himself from the thought of Sakura. He was determined to run until he would not gaze like a mournful idiot at his microwave of all things. He would have even called Gai for some healthy competition if he hadn’t been chaperoning a martial arts tournament in a different city like the thoughtful and community-minded person that he was. Kakashi huffed with affectionate irritation.
He was already feeling the strain of his pace in his lungs as he gulped down fresh air that didn’t smell of stale donuts and metallic paint. Clearly languishing on the couch for five days had done very little to maintain his fitness level.
He’d have to clean the apartment before Sakura came back, whenever that would be. She still hadn’t texted him. He wondered if she was waiting until the weekend to return.
Then he realized he was failing miserably at the task he had set himself—not thinking about Sakura—and sped up. He felt the strain in his muscles as he opened his stride, blindly running past the quiet residential homes that became more and more common the further away he ran from the university.
His mind was empty of everything but the resonant hum of his body in motion, the length of his strides like a clean and well-timed machine. He went one mile, then two, then three, and then he lost count. He was in a neighborhood he had never run in before, but it didn’t matter because it felt like the run was burning something out of him. It was a cleansing kind of fire in his muscles. It ate through the doubt and the guilt, leaving nothing in its wake but the kind of cleanness that came when something had been scoured by heat.
He took in a deep breath, the night cool and dark around him. He felt like a warm knife gliding through something cold.
It all stumbled to a halt when he felt his foot catch on a broken piece of the sidewalk. He had the belated feeling of falling, felt a less pleasant kind of burn in his arm as it caught on the metal edge of a mailbox, and then he was on the ground. More precisely, he was in the gutter next to a curb.
For a moment he just laid there, staring up at the sky that had gone pitch black above him. Of course. Of course, this had happened. Of course he had run until it was dark without realizing, and of course he had tripped on something while he was so far removed from his thoughts that he wouldn’t have noticed a wall rising up from the ground. Some very ill part of him sniped that he deserved it, but he ignored that snide little voice.
He sighed and fished his phone from his pocket and winced. Enough time had passed that he was probably about seven miles from his apartment. He should have turned back ages ago. His phone battery was also at 4%.
He opened his Uber app and tried to call one. The stupid searching icon spun for a minute. His battery ticked down to 3%.
We’re having trouble finding you a ride.
He allowed himself to swear then. He sat up so that he was no longer lying in the gutter and his arm burned with a bright kind of pain. He looked at it in surprise and shined his phone on the giant gash that ran down the length of his forearm. He simply stared at it for a moment, then looked up at the sharp edge of the mailbox he had indeed bled all over when it cut him.
He sighed wearily. Of course, he thought again.
He had run to the middle of bumfuck nowhere, where there were no Ubers to take him home. His arm was bleeding all over everything and he probably needed stitches even though he had a phobia of hospitals. Gai was volunteering and being an excellent human being beyond his reach, Obito and Rin were being forced to drink expensive wine somewhere, and Genma was working a job out of town.
He was alone. He was utterly alone.
He thought it would probably be healthy to cry, or to swear again, but all he could manage was sitting very quietly. Rock bottom, he realized, was a quiet sort of place.
His phone battery ticked down to 2% and he forced himself to be pragmatic. He could knock on a door, but the kind of people who lived in this part of suburbia would probably just call the police on some man bleeding in a bandana. Then he would end up bleeding in a police station, and probably with an ambulance bill if they saw his arm.
He didn’t know how to get home, because he hadn’t been paying attention to where he was running. He had assumed his phone would guide him back when he was ready to return.
He had only one option left.
He wondered if there was a special place in hell for men who called their sort-of-ex-roommate-almost-girlfriend after three days of silence to ask for a ride. He briefly entertained the idea of Ino pulling up instead of Sakura and running him over. He’d be fine with that, as long as she didn’t ask him more questions about his emotional state.
His phone battery ticked down to 1%.
He forced himself to make the call. He wondered if she would pick up, but somehow he knew she would. Sakura was the kind of person who always answered when people called, regardless of what they had done to her.
“Kakashi?” her voice was quiet, measured. He had missed it so much.
“Hi,” he sighed.
A moment of taut silence, then, “What happened?”
He smiled despite himself. Of course she already knew something was wrong. Of course repeated that little voice in his head, but now instead of sounding defeated, it sounded relieved.
“I fell when I was running. And an uber won’t pick me up. And I don’t know where I am.”
“How badly are you hurt?”
He glanced at his arm, still lazily oozing blood all over the concrete. “Um, not that badly.”
“Kakashi.” Her voice was sharp and knowing.
“I might need stitches,” he admitted.
She made a frustrated sound. “Send me your location. I’m coming to get you.”
His heart soared with relief and excitement, even as another part of him plummeted. He would get to see Sakura again. The want warred with the fear and won.
“Ok,” he said softly. “Thank you.”
She sighed. “I’ll see you soon.”
Sakura had a very hard time inventing an excuse that got her out of Ino’s apartment without suspicion. She had a feeling Ino wouldn’t have been sympathetic even if Kakashi were dying in a ditch somewhere, and she wasn’t entirely convinced that he wasn’t. He was the kind of person who would lose a finger and call it a minor inconvenience.
Worry ached in her chest as she drove to the location he had sent. She made it to tree-lined streets, a nice but poorly lit neighborhood because the kinds of people who lived here didn’t go out at night. What the hell had he been thinking, running so fast in the dark? She was furious with him, she hated him, she loved him, she wanted him to be alright, she wanted him to never be alright, she wanted—
To see him.
She sighed shakily as she pulled up to a sad shape sitting on the curb. He stood up when he saw her headlights. He was just as tall and wiry as he had been three days ago, even slouched with embarrassment as he came over to her car. He opened the door to the passenger seat, and he smelled the same as he usually did when he sat down. It made her want to cry and shout at the same time.
He looked over at her nervously.
“Show me what needs stitches,” she said briskly to keep herself from falling apart.
He held up his arm and she gasped. “Kakashi! That is awful!”
He cringed. “It looks worse than it feels.”
She glared. “We’re taking you to an ER.”
“No,” he said with the kind of certainty that she knew was final for him. She hated that she could still recognize the battles she couldn’t win in his voice. “No hospitals.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t do hospitals,” he said.
She remembered what he had said at the party.
What if you got sick?
She thought Kakashi might have been the kind of kid who spent a lot of time at hospitals when he was younger. She thought of the parents he had never mentioned, the independence that bordered on pathological, the nervous half looks he gave her scrubs on the days she shadowed Tsunade.
She had seen kids like him in the hospital, so small and yet so old in the way they carried themselves. She saw them in the OR sitting area with one parent, waiting for the other that was being operated on. There was something tired in their faces, something that already didn’t trust. Another surgery even though the last one was supposed to be the last one. Another recovery because the last one didn’t last.
He was watching her steadily, as if he knew she were putting all the pieces together and waiting to see what she would do.
“Fine,” she said. “No hospital. I’ll take you to the university and stitch you there.”
His shoulders softened with relief. “Thank you, Sakura.”
Don’t say my name, she wanted to snap at him. I can’t bear it.
Say my name, she wanted to beg him. You haven’t said it in days and I want to hear it again.
Instead she said nothing, and put the car back into drive.
Sakura steered him through hallways of the medical school building. They all looked the same to him, but she navigated the catacomb with utter certainty. So this was where she spent all her time when she wasn’t in the apartment with him. He was surprisingly jealous of all the ugly linoleum and the stale fluorescent smell.
They walked into a room with some pathetic looking couches. A man with long brown hair was sitting on one of them, poring over a notebook.
“Neji, I wasn’t here,” Sakura said over her shoulder.
“You weren’t here,” he repeated dully, not looking up from his notes.
She led Kakashi into a room with a few hospital beds and carts with supplies. “Sit over there,” she said gruffly, going to the sink and filling a metal bowl with water.
He sat tentatively on the crinkly paper of a bed. “What is this place?”
“This is where we practice our bedside manner and treat some volunteer patients.”
“I’m sure you’re the nicest doctor out of all of them.”
“Don’t try to make me laugh,” she said sharply.
He fell silent as guilt pulsed in his chest. She was right. He didn’t get to pretend nothing had changed.
She came back with the bowl and sat looking at his arm for a long moment. “What is it?” he finally asked.
Her eyes darted briefly up to his. “We don’t have any numbing anesthetic here. If we took you to a real hospital, they could numb your arm.”
“That’s fine, don’t worry about it.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said softly.
“You couldn’t,” he said automatically. “You could never.”
She met his eyes. A sharp, bright kind of feeling was there before she pressed it back down. She gave him a hollow smile. “That’s a nice sentiment, but objectively, this is going to suck. I have to pick gravel out of your arm.”
He forced himself to smile back. “It’s my fault for running in the dark.”
She placed an empty bowl under his arm and began to carefully rinse the gravel from the road out of his cut. “Why were you doing that?”
To try not to think about you. Because all I can do is think about you.
“I’ve become nocturnal,” he said instead.
“After all the shit you gave me over my sleeping schedule?”
He smiled even as he felt a large rock being pried out of an indent in his skin. “I think I understand now. The apartment is cozier at night.”
“Hm.”
He hesitated. “Where have you been the last few days?”
She didn’t look up. “A deep dark cave with all the other Seamgols.”
He laughed. “About that, Genma dropped off a surprise for you.”
She said nothing and he felt his smile falter, then vanish. He sat in silence watching her face as she worked, eyes down so all he could see was the half-moon of her lashes. She seemed tired. He wondered if she had been eating well. She also smelled like a new perfume—like none of the regular shampoo or conditioner that still sat in their apartment.
She stood up abruptly and went to the door. “Neji can you come here for a sec?”
The man with long hair emerged from the lounge room, rubbing at his eyes. “What is it?”
“Can you take a look at his arm for me?”
Neji stopped in the doorway and gave her a bleary and incredulous look.
“You want me to check your stitches?” He eyed Kakashi. “You should be grateful she’s the one doing them.”
“I haven’t done the stitches yet. I just want you to make sure that I didn’t miss any rocks or gravel. I want your freakishly good eyesight.”
He rolled his pale eyes and went to wash his hands at the sink. “I want access to all the study guides you make for the next month.”
“Deal.”
He came over and pulled a rolling stool up to where Kakashi was sitting. He tilted Kakashi’s forearm from side to side, prodding at the edges of the cut with a tool that Sakura had used. Now that she wasn’t the one using it, it suddenly seemed much more noticeable and painful. Kakashi forced himself to hold back a wince. He knew Sakura would haul him off to the hospital in a storm of concerned fury if he so much as blinked.
“So tough guy is gonna get stitches without any lidocaine?” Neji muttered as he worked.
“Yes,” Sakura said curtly.
Neji raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
“Aren’t you going to ask why?” Kakashi asked, surprising himself. He wasn’t the kind to make small talk with strangers, but he found that he was willing to talk about anything if it meant not thinking about the disembodied feeling of someone poking around inside his arm.
“No,” Neji said. “Lots of people don’t have access to healthcare.”
“He does,” Sakura said. “He just doesn’t want to use it.”
“That’s stupid,” Neji said.
Sakura hmphed in agreement and Kakashi decided it would be safer not to talk anymore, regardless of the arm rummaging.
“So,” Neji finally said. “Are you two dating?”
“Neji!”
“What?” He gave Sakura a flat look. “Tenten wants to start a support group for partners of med school students. Last week she told me that I smell like a chlorinated pool.” Sakura snorted as Neji leaned back from Kakashi’s arm. “There’s nothing in there that isn’t supposed to be there. I expect study guides delivered to my inbox weekly.”
“Thanks, Neji.”
Neji slouched back out the door. “It’s nice not needing a bedside manner,” he said wistfully as it swung shut behind him.
“He’s pleasant,” Kakashi said.
Sakura rolled her eyes. “You’re one to talk.” She threaded a needle and pinched the split pieces of his arm together. “Think of something to talk about while I do this.”
Kakashi held his breath even as she began. “What did he mean when he said your stitches.”
“It’s how Tsunade discovered me.”
“Discovered?”
“The university was doing some experiment with new medical technology. They had a machine that could do stitches, and they wanted to compare its work to medical students in training. We worked on dummies and pigs feet and it calculated a bunch of statistics on the stitch width and other things.”
“So how did you get discovered?”
“My stitches were exactly the same each time, like the machine. They called me in thinking I was a random outlier, or that it was some weird fluke, and they had me do it again. And again. And again.”
“And each time it was the same?”
“Yup. Just like the robot arms. Lots of annoying jokes were made about that. To this very day, I still feel like bursting into stress tears if someone says Dr. Roboto.”
“Did you know you were talented before they tested you?”
She smiled tiredly. “Wow, you think I’m talented? And no, I had literally no idea. I got good grades on the pigs feet I had stitched up before, but so had a lot of people. I knew I had good control, but I thought everyone did. I also don’t think doing precise stitches would impress most people in the medical profession. Stitched is stitched, one way or another.”
“So what happened?”
“Tsunade basically dragged me to her office and sat me down to tell me she wanted to train me. I was absolutely terrified. I was this mess halfway through her first year in med school who had just wanted some extra cash from a study, and all of a sudden I was being told by a literal legend that I had potential as a surgeon? I think I almost threw up on her.”
Kakashi squinted down at his arm, then wished he hadn’t. Sakura was still only about halfway through the gash. “So my stitches are going to be special medical prodigy stitches?”
“You’ll receive the bill at a later date.”
“Can I pay in soup?”
Her smile wavered at the edges and his stomach turned. So there was his answer then. He couldn’t pay her in cooked meals anymore, because she wouldn’t be coming back.
“What can I say to get you to come back?” he asked quietly.
She glanced up in surprise, then pursed her lips. “I think we both know there isn’t a way I can come back, or for things to be the same as they were.”
Kakashi knew she was right, but he couldn’t bear it. The last few days had only been bearable because there had been some kind of imagined end in sight. He had told himself that eventually she would return. Eventually she could kick the door open after buying groceries, eventually the bathroom would smell like her shampoo again, eventually she would try to steal Pakkun and convince him to sleep in her room for the night.
She looked up at him and saw something in his face that made her pause her work. “Kakashi,” she said gently. “Why do you need to be alone?”
“I don’t need to,” he said automatically.
“But you don’t want to,” she said softly. “So if you don’t want to be alone, but you still choose to be alone, it’s because you feel like it’s necessary. Why does it feel necessary to you?”
He stared at her green eyes. How was he supposed to explain? How was he supposed to explain the way his father had caved in like some kind of fruit whose inside had been carved out after his mother had died. How was he supposed to explain the way his father had become a ghost, and that not even Kakashi had been enough to keep him from tapering away with each passing day. That no amount of Kakashi’s good behavior or general impressiveness had been enough to make his father stir from that permanently empty state.
To love in that way was terrifying. It was like begging the universe to steal something from him. Everyone was one random accident away from a life permanently changed by catastrophe. Every single day, they faced the very real possibility that their lives could be ruined by something completely out of their control. They were all living on a slender knife’s edge, and some people were just better at ignoring it than others.
Kakashi was never unaware of it. He was never unaware of the impending doom bound up in every single what if, what if, what if. And maybe because he was some kind of narcissist, he felt like the universe had one lazy and cruel eye fixed on him. He had lost his mother, then two years later his father, and even now, he still felt like he endangered the people around him by loving them. He in particular was cursed. He in particular wasn’t allowed to have these kinds of relationships. He in particular invited harm to his most precious people by loving them.
“Kakashi,” Sakura said. He realized he was crying, probably getting tears all over her perfect stitches. She smoothed her finger over his wet cheek, a perfect and steady surgeon’s hand. A hand that had bound him back together. “Talk to me,” she whispered.
He realized he didn’t just want to love Sakura. He already did. And it scared him so much that it felt like it was killing him.
He told her about a nine-year old boy whose mother had died slowly, and painfully. Whose last months had been colored by intense pain that she hadn’t been able to hide from her husband or son, and how that pain had poisoned something in his Dad. How his Dad had never recovered from bearing witness to that suffering, and how he hadn’t been able to live after seeing it. How Kakashi had gone to an Uncle who loved him but didn’t know how to talk about any of it, and who was afraid to let the memory of that pain broach the fragile balance of his own functioning now that he had a kid to take care of. How he loved his Uncle so much, but Kakashi had grown up in a kind of silence that felt like protection more than anything else. And how now he felt like he had to extend that protection to everyone else. In silence, in aloneness, there was safety.
As he spoke, crying, she finished stitching his arm. And then she held him very close as he cried into her neck, somehow feeling utterly safe and like he was in great danger.
He felt like an old bullet had been removed from him, something that had been leeching lead into his blood finally gone. He would never not be afraid of losing Sakura, but he didn’t want the reason he lost her to be him. He didn’t want to go back to the apartment and know that it was empty because of him.
“I love you,” he said into her skin. “I’m scared, but I love you. Please come home.”
She held him closer and nodded.